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History of this project

The project attempts to address the interpreter, the language, and the culture. The internals of the version 5 interpreter are so tangled that they hinder maintenance, thwart some new feature efforts, and scare off potential internals hackers. The language as of version 5 has some misfeatures that are a hassle to ongoing maintenance of the interpreter and of programs written in Perl. And finally, the entire Perl community is invited to participate in the design and implementation of Perl 6.

"Perl 5 was my rewrite of Perl. I want Perl 6 to be the community's rewrite of Perl and of the community."

"The Perl 6 design process is about keeping what works in Perl 5, fixing what doesn't, and adding what's missing. That means there will be a few fundamental changes to the language, a large number of extensions to existing features, and a handful of completely new ideas. These modifications, enhancements, and innovations will work together to make the future Perl even more insanely great -- without, we hope, making it even more greatly insane."

The vision for Perl 6 is more than simply a rewrite of Perl 5. By separating the parsing from the compilation and the runtime, we're opening the doors for multiple languages to cooperate. You'll be able to write your program in Perl 6, Perl 5, TCL, Python, or any other language for which there is a parser. Interchangable runtime engines let you interpret your bytecode or convert it to something else (e.g., Java, C, or even back to Perl).